Economists agree that specialization and trade improve living standards, yet public skepticism toward trade is rising.This suggests economics instructors need innovative ways to present trade's benefits.This classroom game, inspired by research suggesting early humans outcompeted Neanderthals through trade, highlights trade's transformative power.Adaptable for various class sizes, the 50-minute activity is ideal for introductory economics courses and fosters discussion of outcomes and implications.By framing trade as a vital factor in human evolution, the game connects economic concepts with anthropology and evolutionary biology, enhancing student engagement and understanding of the benefits of trade historically and in today's world.1 For example, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on $380 billion worth of goods, including tariffs on most Chinese goods, a 25% tariff on most steel imports, and a 10% tariff on most aluminum imports (York, 2024).The Biden administration kept most of these Trump tariffs in place while placing additional tariffs on Chinese semiconductors and electric vehicles (York, 2024), as well as Canadian lumber imports (Fowke, 2021).

The Scoreboard for Excel website (https://www.scoreboardexcel.com/) offers instructors a free download of the program and tutorial videos for assignment creation. The Appendix to this article contains […]

Games have become ubiquitous in our lives. Sometimes we play them without even realizing it. Likewise, economics is everywhere and its matters are so pervasive that sometimes we fail to recognize them. Combining games and economics should help us understand both better and should provide economics instructors with a virtually infinite set of tools that they can use to effectively engage their students. This article shows that many elements from the strategy video game Age of Empires II can be used to exemplify topics from microeconomics and macroeconomics. We also provide sample questions to illustrate the transition from textbookbased to game-based testing.

Amid declining enrollments and financial constraints, economics departments are exploring innovative teaching methods beyond traditional “chalk and talk” (Becker & Watts, 1996). While in-class games, simulations, […]

Using a public data set of Major League Baseball salaries and on-field statistics, this paper runs regressions for all possible combinations of the selected control variables to generate statistically significant but spurious results, a practice known as "p-hacking." This overt, deliberate, and systematic p-hacking leads to many counterintuitive results that can help students think carefully about variable selection, causality, and parsimony. In addition, this paper provides an R script that students can easily modify to fit data sets of their choosing.

We outline five teaching guides that can be used by economic educators to teach topics as varied as gender pay gaps to government bailouts. Each guide is based on a variety of scenes from the NBC television show Parks and Recreation, which are freely available to educators and students online. Each guide is framed around student-to-student discussion to increase active learning in the classroom.

This article illustrates and outlines a series of activities that undergraduate economics professors could use to introduce their principles and upper-level students to topics related to production economics, price discrimination, market structure, and game theory using a timely example and readily identifiable characters. The exercises are autonomous and may be used in isolation. The main characters are Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon and Blue Origin). The objective of this classroom activity is to work through a hypothetical example of what competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin may look like as they compete in the future for commercial space supremacy. Moreover, the learning activities in these exercises are structured in a way that encourages students to participate in a given activity first and then reflect on what they did and how they could have improved their outcome or profitability by applying analysis and economic thinking. Students watch videos before the exercises to flip the classroom.

Active learning approaches generally train students in higher-level skills like synthesis and evaluation through writing, discussion, or problem solving. At the same time, long-term learning gains are achieved when economic content relates to students' experiences. We propose a project that harnesses students' unique and diverse interests in television and cinema for a skit-writing and acting activity called Economics in Three Acts. We conducted a pilot version of this project in an introductory economics course and collected student feedback to assess its validity as a teaching tool. This pedagogy fits well into liberal arts institutions desiring to facilitate learning across disciplines.

Classroom demonstrations that engage learners act as transversals (Picault, 2019) to achieve content acquisition.We bring together two highly engaging hands-on activities that utilize ice cream to stimulate learning.The first activity involves a product taste test with five similar flavors of ice cream.Students try to order flavors from most to least expensive and a dialog ensues about product differentiation.The second activity deploys ice cream sandwiches.Students must examine the functions of money and determine whether ice cream sandwiches could serve as a money.We provide detailed lesson plans for each activity.The lessons are designed for principles-level and 6-12 instruction.